Wednesday is here, now it's gone...

Posted November 17th 2010 05:49 pm

I thought I'd go ahead and get this post out of the way before I forgot tonight (knowing how busy I'll be with cleaning the apartment for "Inspection" on the 30th). You may have also noticed that I'm including comics in the posts. I'm doing this not because I can draw (really, I can't), but these are some of my favorite comics from various sources. They may have something to do with the content of the post, they may not. It depends on what I find that day.

After I posted this morning's post, thing got crazy. First, the web server suffered from a MySQL hiccup. I couldn't get anything to load or edited, which got really annoying, especially since a lot of the sites I create run from our main MySQL database server. After multiple attempts to get it restarted (and stay ON), I sent an email off to my hosting provider, and they said "We restarted it, try it now." I did that, and same thing. Then it hit me: I'm doing a massive download of the main server to a backup server for the hosting server changeover. Could the FTP requests be hogging the sockets and denying MySQL the sockets it needs to access the page information? Maybe. So I slowed down the FTP service I had from 10 files at a time to 3, and limited the download speed. After about 15 minutes, no more MySQL errors. Crisis averted.....for now.

For the majority of the day, I worked on the Blog design and features. The main things I changed were the background (like it?), moved the Social Network features to the top, automatic syntax highlighting for source code, and the toggling (togglation?) of the archive listings (that took me all day). jQuery is certainly being challenging, but I think I'm getting the hang of the basics.

I also learned that the loan that we applied for (won't say though who) was turn down. This isn't the first time, but I'm a grown person, and instead of whining to some random Internet reader or forum list (or to the person's/committee's face), I'm going to say "Ok, thanks for the opportunity. What can I do to improve the business so I can reapply for the loan?" We'll see where it goes from there.

I'm still working on the "Projects" tab, and that should be up by next week (hopefully). I also worked on the F&I site, unifying the Ticket section along with writing a news which should help in the PR/SM department.

This is actually the first day in a month that I've worked without a TV show in the background. Exactly 1 month from yesterday, I started watching Heroes on Netflix and finished 16 days later. The next day, I started Eureka and finished yesterday. Today, I just listened to music on Pandora and worked. It's amazing what a non-distraction workplace can do for the attention span.

I was also asked why I am doing this blog. The purpose is actually 3-fold: #1) to provide family members with updates to what I am doing and the progress I have for our advisors/project owners, which mirrors #2) update our advisors and project owners on the status and progression of their projects, and #3) give myself a personal log to track what I've done over time and where I am going (just in case I forget - say, over a long vacation). I'm also using the Blog as a personal sandbox where I can test and refine new techniques and functions without having to mess up other sites. This way, I can show off what I know and nobody's site will go down because of it........I hope.

I had some criticism about the content of the blog, saying that it was not relevant to some of the viewers, but I want to assure you (generically) that this is more for the advisors and myself. If I include too much jargon in a post, please either let me know or Google it. It would be really stressful to maintain 3 separate blogs (if that many) to update the individual audiences, so I'm going to try to create a function which can extract the appropriate information per audience depending on what is searched. Maybe that's the wrong direction? I won't know until I get responses.

Since the Blog design is basically finished, I'm going to go back to working on the Accelerator. I have a new business idea in mind that I'm really excited about, but I'm not going to say anything until the idea is ready to go public (news-wise, not IPO).